I've had freight delayed, and I've had freight get lost. But never have I had freight stuck on a delivery truck only feet from my exhibit – until I did. I was working for AM General LLC, a vehicle manufacturer best known for producing military Humvees, and it was my job to manage exhibitions of the world-class fighting machines all around the globe. Next on my calendar was the Black Sea Defense and Aerospace Exhibition and Conference, a huge military trade show at an air base in Bucharest, Romania.

My company managed to acquire a booth right at the front of one of the hangars, which was perfect. Besides being in an ideal location for traffic, we could just back our delivery truck up to our booth and unload the Humvee we planned to showcase without having to maneuver the vehicle around the show floor, where any number of accidents could damage the fine finish of our fearsome fighter.

The event was set to open on a Monday, when all manner of dignitaries would show up – including the president of Romania – and run through Wednesday. I'd been in near-constant communication with my team on the ground, and the exhibit had gone up without a hitch. On Sunday at around 5 p.m., I got a call from the team and was told that we had a problem. The Humvee had finally arrived, which was good news because it had been running behind schedule. But that wasn't the issue. The problem was that we didn't have a way to offload it.

Why anyone would deliver cargo without a way to unload it is beyond me. However, I'd used a new carrier for this show, and in what I can only assume was an act of goodwill to save me money – or possibly sheer neglect – the hauler didn't bring any ramps. Whatever the reason, we had to get the Humvee off the truck and into the exhibit, a seemingly simple task that turned out to be anything but.

I started brainstorming easiest solutions first. Were there any ramps anywhere on the air base we could borrow? We scoured the area, including nearby businesses, and couldn't find any. This stumped me. What kind of geographical oddity were we in that didn't have ramps? I figured other exhibitors had brought in vehicles and must have something we could use. But by Sunday evening, everyone had already dropped off their vehicles and departed, taking their ramps with them. Was there a loading dock we could offload at and then find a ramp to drive down? Well, it turned out that apparently air bases don't have much use for elevated docks of any sort.

So I expanded my thinking beyond the walls of the base. There was an exhibition center fairly close by where we could unload, but as I pondered that solution, I realized it wasn't a good one. The Romanian government was unlikely to appreciate us driving an armored military vehicle through the streets of its capital with no permit, and I certainly wasn't looking to create an international incident. What's more, the driver (who would likely be me) could be arrested and our vehicle impounded, which would put us in a far worse situation. And since there was no way for us to acquire the necessary permits on a Sunday evening, we were stuck needing to find a solution on the air base.

I asked if there was a hill nearby, figuring our truck could just back up to the incline and we could drive the Humvee right off. But evidently air bases like to keep their areas free of anything larger than an ant hill. Geesh! How was it that I was in charge of a vehicle meant to overcome all manner of hardship yet could be rendered completely impotent by a 4-foot drop?

By the time I started fantasizing about hijacking a military helicopter to airlift our cargo, I had to admit I was out of useful ideas. So I called our show reps to see how they could help us out. They hemmed and hawed for a while before saying they'd phone me back.

After about an hour, they called with some good news, some bad news, and some worse news. The good news was that they'd found a solution. There was a crane nearby that could come in and move the Humvee for us. The bad news was that it couldn't be there until Monday morning. Well, that didn't sound so bad to me. I was all in even though it was going to cost my company big time. The worse news was that by the time our machine would be on the ground, the president of Romania would be on the base, and no vehicles could be operated during that time for obvious security reasons. So the Humvee could be offloaded on the periphery of the grounds but would have to stay there until the president left. It wasn't a great solution, but it was the best I was going to get.

The crane arrived early the next morning, and all I could do was gawk for a few seconds. It turned out that the only crane they could find was some rusty bucket of bolts from the Cold War era that didn't look fit to lift a Lincoln Log. After I expressed my concerns, the operator asked if he should go ahead and try to unload my precious cargo anyway. What choice did I have? I squeezed my eyes shut, said a little prayer, and acquiesced. For the next 15 minutes, all I could picture was the crane's arm collapsing onto our armored vehicle and putting it out of commission. But it worked! My baby was safe and sound on the ground, albeit still out of the fight.

We waited patiently for the president to leave, which he finally did in the late morning. And then I slowly drove the vehicle through the throngs of people up to the hangar. On the one hand, the Humvee got to have a bit of a parade, which was nice. On the other hand, we weren't done with this saga just yet. The interior of the hangar was so crowded that show management declined to let us drive the vehicle into the exhibit while the show was going on. So the Humvee had to sit there at the entrance (which wasn't the worst thing in the world) until the end of the first day. Finally, after the show had shut down, management deigned to let us unite our vehicle with its exhibit at last.

The silver lining, if there was one, was that the vehicle only had to miss out on the first day of the show, and there were still two more days left to exhibit, which was a bit like losing the first battle but still winning the war. If this episode taught me anything, it's that common sense isn't all that common – as in I think it's common sense to include loading ramps when transporting a vehicle, but not everyone thinks like me, I guess. So now I make sure that whenever we ship a Humvee, we have a ramp to go with it.